Rat

The rat is a recurring minor presence in The Master and Margarita, appearing in both the ancient Yershalaim narrative and the contemporary Moscow sections. It is never a character or a speaking creature, but its appearances consistently cluster around images of decay, corruption, and the hidden, unglamorous underside of power. The rat functions as a small but telling emblem of the novel's broader concerns with moral squalor, the fragility of human institutions, and the way that the grotesque and the mundane coexist with the supernatural.

Appearances in the Yershalaim Narrative

In the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri, the rat is most prominently associated with the centurion Mark, whose nickname is Ratslayer. Mark earned this name because his face was disfigured by a Germanic club during the battle of Idistaviso, where he fought as a soldier under Pilate's command. The nickname itself links the centurion to the vermin he is said to slay, marking him as a figure of brutal, animalistic violence. During the execution on Bald Mountain, Matthew Levi, sitting on a stone in anguish, sees on the yellow earth "the half-destroyed skull of a dog and lizards scurrying around it" — a detail that evokes the same desolate, scavenger-filled landscape where rats would thrive. The rat is thus implicitly present in the imagery of death and abandonment that surrounds the crucifixion.

Appearances in the Moscow Narrative

In the Moscow sections, the rat appears in contexts of financial corruption and bureaucratic absurdity. When Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, the chairman of the tenants' association, is tricked by Koroviev into accepting a bribe of four hundred roubles, the money is later transformed into dollars and hidden in the ventilation duct of his privy. The rat is not directly named in this scene, but the privy — a place of filth and waste — is precisely the kind of setting where rats are expected. Later, in Nikanor Ivanovich's dream of the currency theatre, the master of ceremonies warns that money kept in a cellar may "suffer damage from rats," explicitly linking the rodent to the decay of illicit wealth. The rat thus becomes a symbol of the hidden, rotting underbelly of the Soviet system's obsession with currency and material gain.

The Rat as a Symbol of Decay and Threat

Beyond these specific appearances, the rat is part of a broader pattern of animal imagery in the novel that includes cats, dogs, birds, and lizards. While the cat Behemoth is a speaking, magical creature, the rat remains firmly in the realm of the natural and the repulsive. It represents the kind of mundane horror that the supernatural elements of the novel both parody and amplify. When Woland shows Margarita his globe and she sees a war breaking out — a house destroyed, a child killed — the scene is one of impersonal, mechanical destruction. The rat, by contrast, belongs to the slow, organic decay that follows such violence: the scavenging, the rot, the things that thrive in the aftermath of human cruelty. In this sense, the rat is a quiet but persistent reminder that evil is not only spectacular (like the black magic seance) but also ordinary, creeping, and ever-present in the cracks of everyday life.

Thematic Significance

The rat's appearances, though brief, reinforce the novel's central themes of corruption, cowardice, and the hidden costs of power. In the Yershalaim story, the rat is linked to the violence of the Roman occupation and the callousness of the execution. In the Moscow story, it is linked to the greed and hypocrisy of Soviet officialdom. In both cases, the rat serves as a marker of what is base, hidden, and ultimately inescapable. The novel's famous aphorism "Manuscripts don't burn" suggests that truth and art survive destruction, but the rat reminds the reader that what is rotten also persists — in the form of guilt, memory, and the unglamorous detritus of history. The rat is the shadow of the novel's more flamboyant demons, a creature that belongs to the world of Pilate's hemicrania and Nikanor Ivanovich's bribe, not to the grand flights of Margarita's broomstick.